After Lott, GOP can show the way on race
By W. James Antle III
web posted December 23, 2002
The replacement of Trent Lott as Senate majority leader is a
welcome sign that the Republican Party is serious about color-
blindness and its support for individual rights as opposed to
group identity politics. Now Republican leaders must take the
more difficult next step of translating these principles into public
policy.
Over the course of the next year, the Supreme Court will rule on
the use of racial preferences in college admissions, welfare
reform will be subject to congressional reauthorization,
controversial judicial nominees will require Senate confirmation
and immigration policy will likely be discussed to some extent. In
addition, it is likely that there will be debates among the general
public over issues ranging from hate crimes legislation to
reparations for slavery. How will the Republican White House,
Senate and House of Representatives govern in these areas, with
their unavoidable racial components?
Some will counsel the course of action Lott resorted to in his
BET interview as he fought unsuccessfully to keep his leadership
position. This strategy would have Republicans take proactive
steps to prove they are not racist – by endorsing the NAACP's
liberal agenda of race-conscious affirmative action programs,
increased redistributive government spending and federal
diversity micromanagement. Rep. Bernie Thompson (D-Miss.)
had urged atonement by "pushing for a minimum wage increase,
expanded affordable housing and a prescription drug benefit."
Yet to take these positions would repudiate the very principles
that Lott's comments failed to uphold and that Republicans who
clamored for new leadership should seek to affirm. The moral
basis of racial equality is predicated on our common humanity
and the belief, found in our Declaration of Independence, that
each human being is an individual with innate rights and intrinsic
value. Support for goals, quotas, set-asides and other
preferential polices divides Americans by race while assigning
penalties and benefits on that basis. Discrimination is unjust
whether it is done for good or evil purposes. As Andrew Sullivan
recently observed on his website, an individual subjected to
racial discrimination "couldn't care less if the perpetrator is an old
bigot or a well-meaning liberal."
Moreover, the liberal approach of empowering minorities
through big government has failed. Minimum wage increases
actually reduce entry-level job opportunities for young minority
workers; its adverse impact on employment rates for black
teenagers led economist Milton Friedman to describe the
minimum wage as "one of the most, if not the most, anti-black
laws on the books." David Horowitz has pointed out that the
most liberal Democrats "control 100 percent of the city councils
and school boards that shape the destinies of the poor and
minorities in New York, Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia,
Baltimore, Washington DC, St. Louis, and every other blighted
urban big city in America." If their policies were to succeed, why
haven't they by now? What reason do we have to believe that
policies that have failed repeatedly at the local level will succeed
bearing the imprimatur of the full federal government?
A better option would be to continue successful welfare reforms
that have coincided with a reduction in black child poverty at the
same time former recipients of public assistance have moved
from welfare to work. Taxes should be lowered to unleash the
free market to create new job opportunities. Public school
monopolies should be replaced by choice in education. Policies
that have undermined marriage and the family, as well as the
community, must be repealed and dismantled.
Congressional Republicans should take the lead in promoting
policies that take the government out of the racial bean-counting
game entirely, with a federal version of Ward Connerly's Racial
Privacy Initiative to underscore the party's commitment to what
syndicated columnist Deroy Murdock has described as the
"separation of race and state." They should simultaneously
eschew the vestigial racialism on the right and pandering to the
ubiquitous ethnic pressure groups on the left who try to shape –
and distort – U.S. policy on everything from quotas to unwise
proposals to amnesty illegal immigrants.
This doesn't require Republicans to run left, it simply requires a
level of consistency that will enhance the credibility of principled
conservative stands. In an op-ed piece for the FOX News
website, Radley Balko listed a litany of issues, ranging from
quotas to welfare to even tax cuts, where Republicans were
encumbered from convincingly making the "bigotry-free case" for
their positions until they clearly disavowed the segregationist
sentiment many imputed to Lott's remarks at Strom Thurmond's
100th birthday party. Consistent color-blindness will increasingly
free conservative Republicans to argue for their positions with
the focus being on their policy views rather than their motives.
Republicans cannot only move beyond the controversy of the
past several weeks but prosper if they take steps to insure their
Senate leadership change was based on principle rather than
political expediency. The key is to embrace a vision that leaves
the racial obsessions of the past behind in favor of a bright future
of individualism.
W. James Antle III is a senior editor for Enter Stage Right.
Enter Stage Right -- http://www.enterstageright.com